Making Soup

Midway to Heaven

This was the title of my first book, a memoir for the beautiful wife’s father.  He grew up on a family farm in the mountain town of Midway, Utah.  If visitors to Midway ask, “Midway to where?”  The townspeople, many of Swiss heritage, reply, “Midway to heaven.”  Because he was an unusually good man, it seemed a good title for his story. 

Regular readers know the beautiful wife and I are now the caretakers of the century-old Victorian farmhouse where he grew up.  I love this old house.  The walk-down root cellar is a unique feature of the home.  In olden times it was the storehouse of the harvest that fed the family until the next spring.  As the winter wore on and supplies diminished they could count on having potatoes and onions.  So this week’s menu includes a standard of that time, potato-onion soup.  It's just right for late winter meals.

Soup Basics

Cooks everywhere are rediscovering soup.  Soups are filling but low in calories.   Soups are not only good for you—they’re the best value around.  Soups take time to prepare but a pot lasts several meals and improves with age.  You can even freeze some in a quart jar for emergencies.  Traditional soups are built around five ingredient groups:

• Stock—the main source of liquid.  Usually made from bones, it can also be made from vegetables.  We make most of ours from the carcass of a roast chicken.  (Stock is an old tradition but in the ‘60s stock was replaced with bullion cubes dissolved in water.  Today it’s sold in the store as “broth” but there’s nothing quite like homemade stock for flavor.)
• Mirepoix—the savory combination of chopped carrots, celery, and onions.  There are other combinations, depending on what’s at hand, but this is the standard.
• Flavor—the trio of bay leaf, thyme, and parsley and sometimes garlic occur in most recipes.
• Starch—often legumes, but potatoes and (whole wheat) pasta work also.
• Meat—a little meat adds flavor to the soup and gives you something to chew on.  This is the essence of “sparing” meat intake and a good way to use the odds and ends that might get wasted.

Skip’s Potato Onion Soup Recipe

Ingredients:

  3 C. potatoes, washed and cubed

  1 C. white onion, chopped

  2/3 C. celery, chopped

  3 C. chicken stock

  3 strips bacon

  2 C. milk (some recipes include cream)

  2-3 T healthy fat (to sauté)

  2 T butter or bacon fat (for roux)

  2 T flour

  1 tsp thyme

  ½ tsp or more salt, and ground pepper

  ¼ tsp hot pepper flakes or chili powder

Directions:

1. Place stock in large pot and heat to boil.  While stock is heating cube potatoes (washed, but unpeeled) and place in soup pot.  Chop the onion and celery. 
2. In a frying pan cook the bacon; chop and set aside.  Leave 2-3 T bacon grease in pan. 
3. Sauté the onions and celery in pan, starting onions first.  Add the sautéed onions, celery and flavor (thyme, salt, pepper) to the soup pot. 
4. Reusing the frying pan, make roux with butter/bacon fat and flour; cook about a minute.  Stir in milk and cook 5 minutes to thicken (do not boil).  Add to soup pot. 
5. Continue cooking soup until potatoes are tender.  Remove about half the soup to a blender and puree.  Return to soup pot.  Add chopped bacon, adjust salt and pepper if needed, and garnish with chopped parsley.  Serve.  Makes 8-10 servings.

We serve this with a spinach salad and corn bread.  This morning the Beautiful Wife returned from walking and talking with her friends; she exclaimed upon entering the house, “It smells so good!”  So this recipe will also make your home smell good. 

Menu #5

Menu Wisdom

Learning to eat right in a toxic food environment isn’t easy—especially if Food Inc is spending $30 billion a year to tempt us with the siren song of factory foods.  In Greek mythology, the song of the sirens caused seamen to abandon reason and leap overboard, where they promptly drowned.  In modern times protection from mind-numbing siren songs is found in the purposeful step of writing a menu before venturing out to sea, or to the supermarket.  A menu, thoughtfully written in the safety of the home, charts a safe dietary course.  This is so important we moved menu writing up to Healthy Change #4.

We have hesitated to share our menus.  First, because this infers that whatever is good for us is good for everyone else.  That’s definitely not true; we’re all different.  Second, it suggests we’re nutritional know-it-alls, and we’re not.  Nutrition is an overwhelming complex subject that no single person can master.   But we do dedicate most of our time to the study of nutrition, and are happy to share what works for us. 

So with this post, we will start sharing our menus.  (This will also force us to not skip any weeks, which we all know can easily happen.)  Each menu post will suggest three to four dinners, you fill in the rest based on family needs and tastes.  The beautiful wife likes to eat out on Fridays (we call it research for the blog), we often have an omelet on Saturday night, and Sunday may be a family dinner.  Three warnings:

1. We eat quite simply, so no fancy dinners.  A healthy dietary need not cost more than the modern American diet (MAD).
2. We also cook simply.  Most meals can be prepared in 30 minutes or so.
3. We focus on plant foods with a sparing amount of meat or meat products.  One goal, for example, is to eat the five daily servings of vegetables per the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Menu #5

I know this is the first menu, but we number them according to the Healthy Changes.  So we’ll start with #5.  No recipe is posted here without us first trying it out.  Ditto for the menus—typically we’ll have tried them out the prior week.  This week we stayed in a century-old family home in the Wasatch range of Utah, so ate simple, hearty food.

Monday

• Baked sweet potato, with butter and a little brown sugar.
• Spinach salad, with avocado, tomato, and bacon.

Tuesday

• Potato and onion soup, just right for the cold weather.  See the recipe here.  The soup takes about an hour to prepare, but you save time the 2nd night.
• Whole wheat bread.  Usually we bake our own, but in Utah there’s good bread in the store.

Wednesday

• Salmon.  We try for two fish servings weekly—one fish dinner a week and tuna sandwich for lunch.  We poached the salmon in salted water, then finished it under the broiler, with butter and dill.  We grab a lemon off the tree for use at the table.
• Asparagus, steamed.  It seemed early for asparagus but the price was right.

Thursday

• Potato and onion soup—we enjoy leftovers and this soup tastes better the 2^nd day.
• Corn bread, I used the recipe on the box but reduced the sugar and used more corn meal than flour.   It’s important to use fresh corn meal. 

Please comment:  So that’s our first menu.  We usually have a green salad of some sort with most meals but the cold weather turned us to hot dishes.  Actually, it wasn't too cold for a little Rocky Road ice cream.  Please share your favorite ways of eating salmon.

Working Out

The quick answer:  For a long and healthful life, work up a regular sweat.

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Labor-Making Devices

In the beginning, there was a direct connection between work and food.  Do you recall the charge in Genesis, “By the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”?  For millennia this was true—people worked hard for their daily bread.  Until the 20^th century, this hard work was a sharp check against overeating. 

Then came the Industrial Revolution, with its laborsaving devices.  You could make a long list of the inventions that eliminated the use of muscles.  Your home is likely full of them.  The problem is what we don’t use we lose, and muscles are essential to health, longevity, and appearance.

At the dawn of the 21^st century there’s a new goal:  Invent ways to regularly use your muscles.  This isn’t just about the recommended 30 minutes of daily exercise—though that’s the starting point for this post—it’s about using your muscles all day long in varied ways and going to bed physically tired. 

The photos above are MRI scans from a recent study comparing the muscle mass of active vs. sedentary subjects. Scary, isn't it?  Bottom line, whether 40 or 74, you're better off if you use your muscles. 

Benefits of Exercise

1. Heart disease is the #1 killer in the U.S. but this doesn’t have to be—regular exercise protects the heart.  This is generally known but, sadly, not widely practiced.  Way back in 1953, to the surprise of many, a health study of London bus operators found twice the risk of heart disease among drivers, who were seated, versus ticket takers who moved about the double-decked buses.  Since then a plethora of studies have confirmed the value of physical activity.  Researchers estimate that 2-1/2 hours weekly of brisk walking could save 280,000 heart-related deaths a year in the US.  Warning:  Consult your doctor before starting an exercise program.
2. Longevity is improved with regular exercise.  There are many benefits, including protection of the mitochondria that produce energy in muscle cells.  A N. Y. Times article, “Can Exercise Keep You Young?” summarized the dramatic longevity difference between mice that exercised versus sedentary mice.  If you’re older, consider this article: The Incredible Flying Nonagenarians.”  Experts say regular exercise adds 6-7 active years to your life.  (Yeah, I did the math, you’ll spend one of those years exercising, a small price to pay.) 
3. Exercise reduces the risk of certain cancers and even extends life after a cancer diagnosis.  One report noted how exercise (2-1/2 hours weekly) reduced the risk of dying from breast cancer by 40% and the death risk from prostate cancer by 30%.  Check here for guidance and precautions.
4. The brain is greatly aided by aerobic exercise.  This makes sense; though just 3% of body weight, the brain consumes 20% of the oxygen supply.  The hypothalamus (where short term memory is stored) shrinks with age, as does its memory capacity.  A recent study had a group of sedentary people, aged 55 to 80, start a walking regime (3 walks of 40 minutes duration weekly).  After a year the walking group had reversed hypothalamus shrinkage with a 2% growth.  A control group had shrinkage of 1.5%, even though they did stretching exercises.  There’s something healthful about sweating. 
5. Osteoporosis risk is reduced with exercise.  Because they're attached to each other, strong muscles make for strong bones.  You can see this in the picture above—the dark circle with white interior represents bone. 
6. Maybe it’s vanity, but another benefit of exercise is improved appearance.  It’s not just that you feel better—you also look better.  Which leads to other nice happenings.

Scientists are cautious if they don’t understand the exact mechanism for a benefit, like exercise.  In truth, we don’t know exactly why using our muscles makes us happier and healthier, it just does. 

Healthy Change #5

We begin with the minimum exercise recommendation: regular workouts, working up a sweat doing whatever works for you.  I walk or jog up a nearby hill three days of the week and cycle on alternate days.  The beautiful wife takes a vigorous morning walk with her friends, where they discuss all the news of the day.  The best exercise is the one you keep doing. 

Please comment:  Share the exercise that works for you, and tell how you’ve benefited.  We’ll return to the subject of muscle building three more times this year, addressing resistance training, stretching, and ways to live the muscular lifestyle.  It’s good to be strong!

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

The Good Breakfast

The quick answer:  Breakfast is the easiest meal to make healthy.  Just remember one rule: More natural fiber than added sugar.

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There’s a timeless rhythm to our eating: breakfast, lunch, then dinner, plus a snack or two in between.  Occasional fasting provides health benefits, but skipping meals or eating irregularly doesn’t.  The meal most skipped is breakfast, the subject of this post.  You heard it from your mom, but we’ll say it one more time:  A good breakfast gives you energy for your daily work.  There’s one more benefit to eating regularly:  You’re less susceptible to craving sugary, unhealthy snacks due to fading energy.

Sugar bad; fiber good

In the modern diet of refined foods we eat way too much added sugar, and too little natural fiber.  Because the MAD diet is a scary bad risk factor for the chronic diseases, Science has provided sugar and fiber guidelines:  Refined sugar has a maximum limit, while fiber has a minimum requirement.

Sugar:  The American Heart Association says added sugar intake shouldn’t exceed 100 calories daily, or 6 tsp (26 grams) for women or 150 calories, 9 tsp (39 grams), for men.  (Don’t worry about the natural sugars in fruit—Nature delivers them with protective nutrients.)

Fiber:  The Institute of Medicine recommends 14 grams daily per 1000 dietary calories.  Per the NHANES data, the average woman eats 1833 calories, while men consume 2475 calories.  So our fiber goal is 26 grams for women, and 35 grams for men.  Basically we should reverse our diet to eat more fiber than sugar.

A Simple Rule:  Counting your daily grams of sugar and fiber is crazy hard so Word of Wisdom Living offers a simple rule:  Processed foods—the bulk of the MAD diet—should have more fiber than sugar.   This follows the guidance given above.  It’s easy to check because processed foods are required to show the grams of sugar and total fiber on the nutrition facts panel.

Applying the Fiber>Sugar Rule

We visited the breakfast cereal aisle of a local supermarket and checked every cereal against the fiber>sugar rule.  (That little horizontal “v” means, ‘greater than’.)  The results were reported in the post, Trouble In The Cereal Aisle.  Bottom line:  Of 128 packaged cereals only 13 met this healthy rule.  In other words, 90% of those over-priced breakfast cereals don’t meet basic health rules.  This is a food disaster.

Here are some cereals that met the rule:  old-fashioned Shredded Wheat (no white sugar coating); Post Grape Nuts; and Kellogg’s All Bran.  Regular oatmeal has no sugar added so is a great breakfast dish. 

We also applied the Fiber>Sugar Rule to the bread aisle in the post, Waking Up In The Bread Aisle, with similar results.  We didn’t bother with the cookie aisle—the stuff is terrible and doesn't really taste good.

A Better Breakfast

It goes against one’s sense of thrift that packaged cereals contain ingredients costing pennies per pound but are sold in stores for dollars per pound.  It’s both cheaper and healthier to cook a breakfast of whole grains.  So we developed a recipe called the Breakfast Compote based on whole grains sweetened with fruit; you can see the recipe here.  Its as healthy as a breakfast can be—we eat it five days a week by varying the ingredients.

Worried that a breakfast so healthy is too costly?  I got a scale and calculated the cost of ingredients for my Breakfast Compote—it’s way cheaper than the unhealthy stuff in the cereal aisle.  So one more time: It really is cheaper to eat healthy, if you use natural foods and are willing to cook.

There’s a seasonal rotation to the fruits we use:  strawberries in the spring, peaches in the summer, pears in the fall, and apples in winter.  (Actually, spring strawberries showed up last week in our farmers’ market.)  You can have blueberries year around by buying in bulk and keeping them in the freezer.  They pour out like marbles but thaw quickly.  I’ve made two other changes:  we’ve gotten good results by increasing the ground flaxseed from 1 tsp to 2 tablespoons, and we add Katie’s Granola, recipe below, to improve texture and flavor.  We eat the Breakfast Compote five days a week; I put a little milk on mine but the beautiful wife prefers fresh orange juice. 

If your husband won’t get up and cook for you, try the Swiss breakfast of Muesli.  (Yes, the beautiful wife is half-Swiss.)  Available in health food stores, it’s basically oats with dried fruits and nuts.  My brother-in-law makes a fruit smoothie for breakfast.  My fancy sister makes oatmeal once a week and saves it in the fridge using a bread pan for easy serving.  You can also make granola.  We use the recipe called Katie’s Granola, found here.

A New Friend

Katrina Jones writes a blog—Katrina’s Kitchen—that I like.  Check out her recipes for healthy breakfast treats, like Blueberry Muffins (whole wheat flour, just a little honey, no sugar); Homemade Granola; or something I’d never heard of, Carrot Pancakes.  We find very few blog that focus on healthy eating as we understand it, but Katrina seems to get it.

Healthy Change

Please comment:  Share your healthy breakfast ideas, your recipes, or your timesaving tips.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

Sharing Menus

Mitt Romney meets Mike Pollan

The first goal of this blog was to share insights on healthy living, chiefly diet.  We distilled these insights from the oracles at hand: science, tradition, and scripture.   Our title is taken from the Word of Wisdom, a canonized scripture that Mormons are still learning to live.

Though scripture serves as our north star, our blog seeks a conversational tone that invites cooks of every persuasion.  Diversity is strength.  Which brings us to a current food article in the N. Y. Times, “Not Just for Sundays After Church”.  The article is about the evolving Mormon cuisine: “With Mitt Romney’s candidacy for the White House, Americans are newly curious about all the traditions of the [Mormon] church he has done so much to support.”

The article notes, “Healthy living was of great interest to the religion’s founders, and their dietary prescriptions of little meat, much produce and plenty of whole grains make them sound like proto-Pollans.”  And it’s true; Pollan’s excellent book, In Defense of Food, heavily influenced by science, also resonates with our understanding of a scripture-guided diet, in contrast to that crazy modern (MAD) diet the world has stumbled into.

The Last Word on Menus

The last three posts have invoked excellent comments on writing weekly menus.  You, who comment, besides sharing your ideas, also shape this blog.  I’ve gone back and analyzed the first 2000 comments on this blog.  It took me two days; two themes  resonated:

1. Readers want practical recipes that follow our healthy-eating precepts.
2. Readers want wholesome, affordable menus based on these recipes.

There’s a repeating theme in the comments.  Homemakers are concerned about the health of their family and they are tired of the pressure and poor outcome of “wingin’ it” at dinnertime.  There is a growing interest in menu writing but we need a better way to share ideas.

Please Comment

After some pondering, it seems we might move to a new format of three posts a week:

• One post would feature the Healthy Change of the week, with supporting information. 
• The second post would offer a suggested menu of three or four dinner meals, with recipe references. 
• The third post (most weeks), would provide a recipe congruent with the Healthy Changes(s).  To reflect a broad spectrum of ideas, we would need readers to share menu ideas.  This could be done through our email address.

Please comment:  Is this a good way to go?  Is there a better way? And please excuse that we haven't posted this week's Healthy Change on better breakfasts.  It will follow in a day.

Photo from the N.Y Times

One Thousand and One Meals

One challenge for moms is to maintain comforting routine, while simultaneously making life interesting for the family.  Know what I mean?  A week ago I told of two women eating breakfast by the beach on a sunny morning.  Now we are in an old family home in a small town in the Rocky Mountains, enjoying the beauty of newly fallen snow.  Perhaps it's the change of environment, but this morning I awoke early with a story running through my head.  It was inspired, I think, by the challenge of menu writing.

The creativity of our readers’ menu writing enchants me.  Some assign themes to the nights of the week.   You alliterate:  meatless Monday, themed Tuesday, or watery (for fish) Wednesday.  Or you become Marco Polo, exploring the globe:  Chinese on Tuesday, Italian on Wednesday, etc.  Then there’s the kaleidoscope method where you turn to your library of cookbooks and randomly flip through the pages, seeking whatever excites. 

Menu writing reflects the cook’s dilemma:  Homes (and homemakers) do best with established routines, but routine is inherently boring.  So there’s this balancing act, the daily dance between comforting normalcy and stimulating variety.  It brings to mind the plight of Scheherazade.

Scheherazade, you may recall, was the story-telling Arabian princess in One Thousand and One Nights.  Her new husband, a Persian king once betrayed by an unfaithful queen, avoided an embarrassing repeat by executing each new queen the following day.

The clever Scheherazade survived by concocting bedtime stories that always included a preview of the next night’s tale.  The king, entertained and intrigued, daily spared her life.  Finally, after 1001 nights, he found life too boring without her creative efforts and made Scheherazade his permanent queen. 

Does anything about coming up with an enjoyable dinner, night after night, make you think of the clever and creative Scheherazade?  This litle story entry introduces tomorrow’s subject:  Breakfast.

More on Menus

The quick answer:  In your menu planning, homemade soups and casseroles provide both nutrition and value.

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Paula Deen and Southern Cooking

To spend time in the Deep South, especially the small towns, is to appreciate the colorful uniqueness of the people.  They’re good folks—hospitable, hard working, and mostly happy.   Their diet is unique: grits, sweet potato pie, and something fried.  If they serve you a steak, it’s supposed to overlap both sides of your plate.  They like BBQ from shacks in the woods that have never seen a health inspector.  My favorite treat was pecan pie. 

Life can be hard in the South.  You’ve heard the phrase attributed to Nietzsche: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”?  In one way it’s true, for the South has more than its share of strong people.  You’ve likely heard the phrase, “steel magnolias.”  There’s plenty of steel in celebrity chef Paula Deen, who overcome a difficult childhood to make millions as the unapologetic advocate of politically incorrect food. 

This week Deen revealed she’s been diabetic for three years, the likely result of a lifestyle that included little exercise and lots of sugary and deep-fried foods.  When the news of her secret came out there were immediate cries of “hypocrite”.  Deen can ignore her detractors, most, after all, are Yankees, and her sons aim to get rich with “light” versions of her recipes.

The controversy will die down but this question remains:  What if Paula Deen had spent 2011 living the 52 Healthy Changes?  Poor girl, she really missed out.  A slim and healthy Paula Deen would have been a hit when Dancing With The Stars came calling.

The Soup Aisle

A reader, Zane, commenting on menu writing, said soup was a staple in their family dietary.  Here’s a brief history of soup in America.

Homemade soups are enjoyed around the world; they’re economical, healthy, filling, and low in calories.  Americans got out of the soup habit and I blame it on the success of the Campbell Soup Company.  In the 20^th century battle over the supermarket soup aisle, Campbell’s canned soups were the clear winner.  No contest.

But there was a big problem:  Though a labor-saver for the housewife, the usual attributes of soup—value, taste, and nutrition—were lost.  Soup consumption declined—canned soup just didn’t taste that good, even with all the added salt.  There was a revival when casserole recipes using canned soups became popular in the ‘50s but they didn’t taste all that good so this only turned a generation off on casseroles.  Casseroles, properly done, have the all virtues of homemade soup.

So one of the goals of this blog is to restore homemade soups to the American dietary.  They’re tasty, economical, low in calories, and can be used for several meals.  And if cooking, as others have said, is how you add love to ingredients, then these slow-cooking dishes are the stuff of sweet dreams.

Menus and Constancy of Purpose

In my work life, no person influenced me more than W. Edward Deming.  Deming, now deceased, was the statistical guru who taught the Japanese after WWII that they could be more successful making quality products than by just offering the cheapest goods.  He offered a system for efficiently improving quality based on what he called profound knowledge.  The Japanese, humbled by defeat, listened and as Japan Inc. prospered he became a revered figure. 

Our approach to this blog, Word of Wisdom Living, is influenced by Deming’s teachings.  We shun the ever-changing “exciting news of the day” broadcast by the media, which makes nutrition confusing for many.  Our policy is to focus on basics, apply them to the life of regular people, and steer a steady course.  We find the wisdom of traditional foods and olden ways more compelling that the latest study.

A primary Deming teaching was “constancy of purpose.”  Using an effective tool for a few weeks doesn’t make a big difference.  But there’s real power if it becomes a habit.  Nutrition is a perfect application for constancy of purpose.  Chronic disease develops slowly, over decades.  So good health requires doing the right thing over the long term.

New Years resolutions are good, but the big benefit lies in what you do all year long.  And this brings us back go this week’s Healthy Change of writing weekly menus.  Did you notice this was HC#13 last year?  We’ve moved it up to #3 position for good reason—a menu provides constancy of purpose!   When you write a menu, you focus on healthful and economic ingredients such as lentils, legumes, and vegetables in season.  Plus, with planning, soups, stews, and casseroles become practical.

Please comment:  Share recipe tips, or your favorite soup or casserole recipe.

The Weekly Menu

The quick answer:  To improve health and happiness, write a weekly menu and shopping list.

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I’ve Never Been Happier

Two women, friends who had not seen each other for many years, sat down to a leisurely breakfast at a lovely restaurant overlooking the ocean.  It was a warm, sunny Saturday morning.  They admired the view, talked about the happenings in their separate lives, and caught up on shared friends.  I came late to the meal—was really only there to pick up the bill.  As they said their good-byes, the older lady said something I won’t soon forget:  “I’ve never been happier in my life than I am now.” 

Why is her statement so memorable?  She is dying—painfully—of cancer. 

She had previously sold the home where she and her deceased, husband reared their children, packed what she could fit into a few suitcases, and come to live by the beach.  Her apartment is small and simply furnished, plain enough to suit Thoreau, though it does have a lovely view of Catalina Island.  Her plan, it seems to me, is to sit by the sea in the warmth of the sun, compose music (her avocation), and await her passing. 

So I’ve thought about her words, and how we can find joy through living in harmony with our truest values.  There's a hint here, I think, about changes all of us might consider.  It requires that we listen more to the voices within.

The Voices Without

Food Inc. spends over $30 billions annually to get us to buy their food-like concoctions.  Why do they spend so much?  Because it works.  Humans, the researchers say, fuss over the infrequent decisions in their lives, like what car to buy.  But we tend to outsource the simple, daily decisions, like what to eat, to the culture around us.  We just find it easier to go with the flow. 

A century ago, in 1911, a food that people had used forever, lard, was driven from the market by a massive well-organized advertising campaign.  The campaign promoted Crisco as the modern replacement and suggested that those who resisted weren’t “progressive.”  It was a very successful campaign.  Crisco turned out to be a terrible mistake, but it would take a century to assemble the proof and convince the public. 

Food companies didn’t miss the lesson of Crisco's market launch:  You could sell almost anything with a skillfully done advertising campaign.  This seems arrogant, but we know from sad experience that it works.  Imitation food products continued to replace traditional foods all through the 20^th century.  Clever advertising created a new food culture:  the modern American diet (MAD). 

One purpose of our 52 Healthy Changes is to restore real food to the American dietary.  We must tune out the siren song from the billions spent on advertising and quietly rediscover olden ways.  To regain conscious control of our daily food decisions we turn to the simplest of tools—the weekly menu. 

Weekly Menus

Few people write regular menus.  A basic menu, covering four or five dinners, plus, perhaps, Sunday supper will simplify your life.  The few minutes it takes to write a weekly menu will free you from the frantic scramble to come up with something for dinner.  If you use a menu, you’ll throw out less spoiled food.  If you make a shopping list part of your menu plan, you’ll reduce shopping trips, saving time and money.  If you save old menus and organize them in a binder by season, your life will be even simpler next year.

The popular blog Inchmark is written by our daughter Brooke.  Brooke wrote a great post on grocery lists and provided an editable menu planner and grocery list.

Five Steps for Menu Writing

Here are five steps that work for us in menu planning:

1. Set aside a regular time for menu writing.  Consult the family the night before to get their requests.  Involving them in planning builds family support for the outcome. 
2. Check your inventory.  We look in the refrigerator for food that might spoil, in the freezer to see what needs turnover, and in the pantry for ideas.
3. Write down your meal ideas with links to recipes. 
4. Review the menu for needed ingredients and write a shopping list.  In our best weeks, using a menu-driven shopping list, we only need to shop twice.
5. Share the menu with the family and save it in a binder.  Keep a blank menu in the binder as a place to collect ideas for next week. 

In the first two weeks the Healthy Changes were aimed at reducing sugar intake and eliminating hydrogenated trans fats.  This week’s Healthy Change is designed to protect you from impulse buying and the hassle of last minute shopping. 

Please comment:  How do you write healthy menus and simply grocery shopping?

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.

The Big Fat Lies

The Truth About Fats

The quick answer:  No food group is more incorrectly understood by the public than fat.  For best health, avoid refined (especially hydrogenated) oils, in favor of traditional fats (olive oil, butter, lard, etc.).

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The 2^nd Deadly Trend

Last week we focused on the 1^st of seven deadly changes to our food—the rise of sugar from an occasional treat to America’s biggest source of calories.  Sugar is the #1 additive in processed foods.

This week we discuss the 2^nd deadly change:  factory fats, beginning with vegetable oil hydrogenation.  To explain, here are seven common hydrogenation and trans fat facts:

1. Why were refined oils (corn oil, soybean oil, etc.) hydrogenated?  Hydrogenation extends shelf life.  An unnaturally long shelf life is good for the food business but generally bad for our health.
2. What causes short shelf life?  Omega-3 oils—the ones needed for brain, eye, and nerve health, as well as fertility—after being processed, are highly reactive to oxygen.  When oxidized these oils become rancid which spoils taste. 
3. How do you hydrogenate refined oil?  The oils are heated and passed through a reaction chamber where they are exposed to hydrogen gas in the presence of a metallic catalyst.  The hydrogen saturates the carbon atoms that form the backbone of the oil molecule.  This thickens the oil and makes it much less reactive to oxygen, but also forms toxic trans fats.
4. How bad are trans fats?  They’re deadly.  The Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) is our leading academic center for nutrition.   In 1994, Dr. Willett and others from HSPH published a paper in the American Journal of Public Health showing that trans fats cause between 30,000 and 100,000 deaths every year in the US.  Trans fats are a risk factor for inflammation, diabetes, and heart disease. 
5. How did trans fats get into our diet?  The first hydrogenated fat product was Crisco, introduced a century ago in 1911.  Crisco was followed by margarine as a butter substitute during WWI.  Vegetable oils, introduced later, were partially hydrogenated.  Because processed foods depend on vegetable oils for mouth feel and taste, most processed foods contained trans fats.
6. Are trans fats still allowed in food?  Yes.  As the public has become more informed about the toxicity of trans fats, the use of hydrogenation has declined, but Congress has not banned trans fats, though labeling was required in 2006.  Denmark effectively banned trans fats in food in 2003, followed by Switzerland in 2008.   New York and a few other cities restrict the use of trans fats by restaurants.
7. Why do some processed foods claim “zero trans fats” but have hydrogenated oils in the ingredient list?  Our federal government wrongly allows foods that contain less than 0.5 gram per serving to be labeled “zero trans fats.”   This is shocking because the prestigious Institute of Medicine recommends we eat absolutely no trans fats.

The Power of A Woman

Dr. Mary Enig of the University of Maryland was the first to publicly warn of the toxic nature of trans fats.  She also argued that trans fats were a cause of inflammation and heart disease.  This claim was controversial as the public had been told saturated fat and cholesterol was the main cause.  Enig pointed out that man had eaten saturated fats long before the rise of heart disease.  She further noted that trans fat intake increased in step with heart disease while saturated fat intake actually declined as a percent of calories.

Dr. Enig took a lot of flak from the food industry but stood her ground—time has shown her to be right.  For a better understanding of which fats are healthy, read her excellent book, Know Your Fats.

Dr Fred Kummerow, Enig’s colleague at the U. of Maryland, is also a feisty opponent of trans fats.  In 2009, at the age of 94, he submitted a 3000-word petition to the FDA that began, “I request to ban trans fats from the American diet.”  He publicly commented, “Everybody should read my petition because it will scare the hell out of them.”  I called Dr. Kummerow this morning to see if the FDA had responded to his petition—as required within 180 days.  I’ll share his response when it comes.

Deep Fat Frying

Deep fat frying is the ultimate test of cooking oil, as the oil sits for days at high temperatures, exposed to oxygen.  In the past tallow was successfully used (thus the great taste of the early McDonald’s fries).  When the public was falsely taught that saturated fats like tallow were unhealthy, the food industry converted to hydrogenated vegetable oils.  Unfortunately, because of the trans fats, this was far unhealthier.  Tragedies like this keep happening with Food Inc.

Deep fat frying thus remains the last major use of hydrogenated oils.  To my knowledge, only In-N-Out has stopped, but problematic oxidation of fats from extended use at high temperature remains.  I suspect the very last refuge for hydrogenated oil use will be the mom-and-pop donut shop. 

The 2^nd Healthy Change protects from toxic trans fats and other unhealthy stuff found in deep fat fryers:

This means no French fries, no donuts, no onion rings, no corn dogs, not even the toxic deep fried Twinkies or Snickers Bars at the county fair.  Please note this does not eliminate deep fat frying for the home cook, using fresh and healthy oils.  Better yet, check our recipe, for Oven-Roasted Fries.  The recipe works with sweet potatoes or yams also.

In 13 weeks we’ll return to the subject of fats, discuss the importance of balancing omega-6 and omega-3 in the diet, and recommend the use of traditional fats over refined vegetable oils. 

Pease comment:  Share your experience with trans fats, or your recipe for home fried vegetables.

the bitter truth

The quick answer:  Sugary drinks, with either real or artificial sugars, are a leading cause of chronic disease and premature death.  Pure water is the healthiest drink and a big step towards simplifying your life. 

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Allied With Angels

The 20^th century was a dietary disaster.  Food had remained essentially unchanged through the six millennia of recorded history.  Then, in one century, the industrial revolution reinvented what God had created.  We call what resulted the modern American diet (MAD).  MAD caused the rise of chronic disease (diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc.).  The food reformation’s goal is to recover the goodness of natural food, taking advantage of modern methods, and prevent chronic disease. 

If you read this blog, benefit from the Healthy Changes, and invite your friends and neighbors to join—you are a soldier in the food reformation.  In this battle, you’re on the side of the angels.

Seven Deadly Trends

The industrialization of food can be seen in seven trends.  We’ll visit these trends in the coming weeks.  Trend #1 is the growth of sugar from an occasional treat to the main source of calories in the modern diet. 

In the early 1800s sugar was a rare treat; most sweeteners were natural, local, and seasonal—honey in the summer, maple syrup in the winter.  You couldn’t overdose on honey; first, because the bees made a fixed amount, and second, because honey is less addictive than sugar.  The experts estimate sugar consumption from all sources (honey, maple syrup, molasses, and refined sugar) in that time at 10 lbs. per year, or a couple of teaspoons daily. 

Our sugar consumption today, based on USDA data, exceeds 100 pounds annually.  This is a ten-fold increase from the early 1800s, and five times what the AHA recommends (6 tsp daily for women; 9 for men).  If your sugar intake is average, you get about 25% of your calories from some form of sugar.  There’s something terribly wrong when refined sugar is the leading source of calories. 

Two Heroes

John Yudkin, PhD, MD (1910-1995), was the first to connect sugar to the modern diseases.  In the ‘50s he studied the link between sugar, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease.  (If we had followed Yudkin we wouldn’t have wasted a generation trying to solve heart disease by reducing cholesterol.)  Yudkin wrote a famous book, published 1972 in England as Pure, White and Deadly, and in the U.S. as Sweet and Dangerous, that remains a classic.  Dr. Yudkins is a nutrition hero.

Robert Lustig, PhD, is a UCSF professor and obesity researcher who warns about the danger of refined sugar, especially fructose.  For an explanation, see his YouTube video, Sugar: The Bitter Truth.  Talking about the fructose naturally present in fruits, Dr. Lustig closes with a comment I never expected to hear from a UC professor:  “When God makes a poison (meaning fructose) He wraps it in the antidote.”  Skip the soda drinks; eat apples.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

The essential dietary change is to slash sugar intake to below the AHA goal of 6 tsp (25 grams) daily for women and 9 tsp for men.  For the average American, this is an 80% reduction!  Your blood sugar and insulin levels will decline as you do this, excess fat will slowly disappear, and real food (fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts) will begin to taste better.  (Natural food has a hard time competing with food that’s more like candy.) 

Gary Taubes wrote a detailed book on the health problems linked to America’s excessive sugar intake.  The book, Good Calories, Bad Calories, carefully examines the role of sugar in overweight and obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, infertility, and aging.  It’s a scary book.  If you need motivation to curtail your sugar intake you should read it or others, such as:

• Suicide by Sugar by Nancy Appleton.
• Sugar Nation, The Hidden Truth Behind America’s Deadliest Habit and the Simple Way to Beat it, by Jeff O’Connell
• The Blood Sugar Solution: The UltraHealthy Program for Losing Weight, Preventing Disease, and Feeling Great Now!, by Dr. Mark Hyman.
• Sugar Blues, by William Duffy.

Sugary Drinks

Soft drinks are the #1 source of sugar for most of us, so this should be the first place to cut back.  There’s a hidden secret behind the limit of one 12 oz. soda per week—it’s hard at first but over time you’ll lose the taste and begin to skip weeks. At some point you may say, "My addiction is cured; I can live without sugary factory drinks."

Non-sugar Sugar?

Artificially sweetened drinks are defined as sugary so also come under this rule.  Do you buy diet drinks in the mistaken belief it’s healthier than regular soda?  Society made a foolish mistake when we assumed that food scientists could invent a new molecule that would be intensely sweet but not have the ill effects of sugar.  The bitter truth is artificial sweeteners seem to reinforce the infantile sugar craving in an addictive way, while adding new problems.  See this post for more on the dangers of sugar substitutes.

What to Drink?

When banning an unhealthy product, our policy is to offer a healthy replacement.  So what to drink?  Water!  Drink lots of water.  There is no healthier drink that water!  (We use a Brita charcoal filter on our water.)  Eight glasses daily is a common recommendation.  Here’s a good test of your water intake:  Fill a pitcher with eight cups of water and drink from it for one day.  Measure what’s left at the end of the day.  You’ll find it’s hard to drink the recommended eight glasses but you’ll do better with this pitcher method because of the daily feedback.

Occasionally we get bored and seek variety, something besides water.  A drink flavored with real fruit, even a slice of lime or lemon, makes a nice change.  One flavored drink a day seems enough for our family.  Green smoothies are good too.

Please comment on your experience cutting back on sugar drinks, including artificially sweetened diet drinks.

Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.